Tachyon 390 Cross Assembler and Tachyon z/Assembler User's Guide

Running the Macro File Compression Utility

Supplied with the assembler, is a utility program which can be used to compress macro files using tab compression. The utility can also expand those files should your editor not be able to handle the compressed format. The utility is freely redistributable. The source has been placed into the public domain and is available from: http://www.tachyonsoft.com/x390tab.c.

In a macro expansion the sequence number field (columns 73-80) is not shown on assembly listings, so it can be removed without loss of information. Not only does this save 8 bytes per line, it allows any blanks preceding the sequence field to be trimmed. The line may be further compressed using tab stops every 8 characters. For Windows, a final compression allowed by the assembler is to use UNIX-style end-of-line delimiters instead of DOS-style ones, saving one byte per line. Even though the compression achievable through this utility is not nearly as good as can be obtained using a ZIP utility, you might want to strip off sequence numbers and convert end-of-line delimiters before putting macros in ZIP files in order to achieve the maximum possible compression.

The utility is supplied as a native 32-bit command-line (console-mode) program. You can run the utility from the command line as follows:

    x390tab [options] files

At least one file must be specified. The files and options may be specified in any order. All of the options must start with a dash. Any letters in the options may be specified in upper or lower case. Wild card characters are allowed in the file specifications on non-UNIX systems.

For maximum compression of macro files, you can run the utility like this:

    x390tab -L72 -U *.mac

This will compress all files in the current directory with an extension of “.mac”.

Macro File Compression Utility Options

-c: compresses the files. This is the default.
-x: expands the files.
-d: indicates that the files should be written using the DOS end-of-line delimiter (carriage-return and line-feed). This is the default for the Windows versions of the utility.
-u: indicates that the files should be written using the UNIX end-of-line delimiter (line-feed only). This is the default for the UNIX versions.
-i8: indicates that tab characters in the files will be expanded using tab stops every eight characters. This is the default.
-i4: indicates that tab characters in the files will be expanded using tab stops every four characters.
-o8: indicates that if files are being compressed, that tab characters will be inserted using tab stops every eight characters. This is the default and is the only format supported by the assembler.
-o4: indicates that if files are being compressed, that tab characters will be inserted using tab stops every four characters.
-rl: renames each file to the lower-case from of the file name.
-ru: renames each file to the upper-case from of the file name.
-lnnn: indicates that each line should be truncated after nnn characters where nnn is a number from 0 to 999. The default is 999.
Note: the effect of this option cannot be undone.
-t: indicates that the utility should be run in test mode. In this mode the files will be read but not modified. This is useful to see the effect of compression without actually performing it since the statistics will still be produced.